I seriously objected to a standard was back in 2002 when I first got mixed up in this jitter stuff. A test company had managed to put a compliance technique in a standard that could only be performed on their equipment. Good for their sales, bad for everyone else--as monopolies usually are.

I tried measuring connectorized FR4 backplane S-parameters (your slide 13) back in the day when 1Gbps Fibre Channel was leading edge. My intent was to import the s-parameters into ADS for simulation of signal performance, specifically eye patterns. I never could get good correlation between the simulated system performance and real measured system performance.

"The first time I seriously objected to a standard was back in 2002 when I first got mixed up in this jitter stuff. A test company had managed to put a compliance technique in a standard that could only be performed on their equipment."

It was either the underscore or my complete name, I am advocate of less is more :)

My question was more in the sense of understanding if we could drop the requirement to have a receiver internal eye monitor at very high bit rates and rely only on SW routines to evaluate how wide an eye would be at the receiver slicer? I believe the embedded eye scan/monitor may have some advantages especially with PVT handling but it would also come with some costs...

The first time I seriously objected to a standard was back in 2002 when I first got mixed up in this jitter stuff. A test company had managed to put a compliance technique in a standard that could only be performed on their equipment. Good for their sales, bad for everyone else--as monopolies usually are.

I don't think standards should include equalization schemes. The end goal is to deliver the data, how we manage to deliver the data within the defined parameters (standard) should be left to the ingenuity of the engineers.

Another great talk Ransom. Any idea of how good SW routines running in scopes, BERTs and the likes are modelling the actual implemented equalizers? Can we rely on them to assess eye opening at the RX end with a reasonable degree of confidence or should we target embedded eye scan?

Ah, thanks for your input Ransom. I learned about EQs in school and there's just so many things going on with them. It just seems so complicated to test them without someone knowing their internal structures.

Reminds me of the time, a couple of years ago at DeisgnCon on the opening night jitter panel we were discussing the role of standards bodies and someone in the audience proclaimed standards bodies as "hi-tech socialism."

I've seen internal, built-in test tools that present a limited eye diagram, but I don't think they're so common that we can assume most part will have them. I'm also not sure how accurate they are; not to question their accuracy, just that I don't know.

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